Creating Global Sustainable Smart Cities (A Case Study of Masdar City)

FMany of the global cities are fast developing into resource-starved ecosystems, inefficient, unmanageable and unsustainable, owing to rising population and industrialization, adversely affecting the economic growth and quality of life, health and well-being of the communities inhabiting these cities. Furthermore, because of increasing urbanization, on the one hand, these cities are grappling with day-to-day challenges of risk and security concerns related to economic, technological and social development; and, on the other hand, they are also battling with environmental challenges related to energy, its source and insufficient availability, given that conventional energy sources such as fossil fuels are fast depleting and at the same time energy requirements to drive the physical infrastructure and economic engine of these already over-populated cities are rapidly escalating - not to mention the environmental threats posed by these traditional finite energy sources notoriously known for their carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. Abu Dhabi, one of the emirates of the United Arab Emirates, launched The Masdar City which is presently underway and being built in Abu Dhabi by the subsidiary unit of the state-owned Mubadala Development Company. (Halligan. Neil,2019)¹ This paper delves into the details of Masdar City which is unique and unconventional in many ways as it embraced information and communication technologies (ICT), more visibly Internet of Things (IoT), for better quality of life and performance of services, for an ecologically-balanced integrated urban development thereby becoming a ‘Smart City’. The city further leveraged this smartness in a domain convergent with ‘Sustainability’ with technology-driven goals related to eco-friendly environment, self-generated energy availability through solar, energy efficiency and other zero-carbon features in subsystems such as transportation, civic utilities, physical infrastructure, water management, waste management and so on. Additionally, this conceptual paper reviews the case of other similar global cities and explores how Masdar can position itself as a sustainable, smart city for others to follow